Les galeries-logis

Galerie B-312 is happy to start the year 2024 with the exhibition Les galeries-logis of the duo Pépite & Josèphe. The duo seeks to represent the environment experienced through an artistic practice based on two pillars, field paintings and extension paintings. The field paintings result from long walks during which the duo collects waste objects which dialogue with their formal universe. Accumulated, assembled or dismembered, these vestiges of human involvement form a body of work of which they become the object of study. This intimate relationship with collecting also extends into the extension paintings, a series of custom-made works designed for private residences. Through discussions, the artists collect the experiences of the buyers and the particularities of their living environment to create a personalized painting. The close complicity of the meeting evoked in the work allows the artists to offer a new perspective of the inhabited place.—The exhibition Les galeries-logis links the two aspects of Pépite & Josèphe’s approach and reveals their interdependence. Here, the duo question the commissioned work procedure to strengthen the relationship, inherent to their work, between the imagination, the routine and the territory. Thus, the eight living spaces where the duo’s extension paintings are installed are transposed into lamps, paintings and virtual wandering through photogrammetry.—The installation uses the gaps caused by this capture process to fabricate the homes in miniature caves. Together they create a network of illuminated white shells which float in the middle of the smaller room. A few openings invite the eye to recognize rounded interiors from which a soundscape reverberates, created in collaboration with the composer Xavier Madore.—The large room accommodates a circuit of walls and eight paintings designed on recycled plaster panels. From the documentation of domestic spaces, digital processing of photographs makes it possible to cut the rooms into a constellation of polygons. Meticulous chisel strokes then reveal the images encrusted on the panels like so many precious stones that inlay daily life. These collages are accompanied by a virtual tour of the caves on which the artists worked.—With Les galeries-logis, Pépite & Josèphe demonstrate how their approach to commissioning can fit into the field of contemporary art. The duo uses various recycling processes to begin a reflection on the ways in which the everyday environment and art permeate each other.

—Mathilde Varanese